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      George Santos will be seated on committees, House speaker says

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      George Santos will be seated on committees, House speaker says Kevin McCarthy deflects growing calls for Santos to resign over his largely made-up résumé and suspect campaign finances George Santos – the New York Republican congressman under local, state, federal and international investigation over his largely made-up résumé, suspect campaign finances and potentially criminal aspects of his personal history – “will get seated on committees”, the US House speaker said on Tuesday.How McCarthy’s speaker deals will cause ‘cannibalistic brawl among extremists’Read moreSpeaking to reporters at the Capitol, Kevin McCarthy said: “We will be done with all committees today – he will get seated on committees.”McCarthy must govern with a narrow majority, 222-213. Earlier this month, Santos supported McCarthy through 15 votes for speaker.McCarthy has deflected growing calls for Santos to resign, from Republicans in New York’s third congressional district and on Capitol Hill from senior Democrats.Instead, McCarthy and other Republicans have said the New York freshman should be subject to a House ethics process the party is trying to gut.Santos’s résumé has been shown to be largely fictional, including claims about where he went to college, which companies he worked for, and his racial and family background.Democrats and an outside watchdog have called for an investigation of Santos’s campaign finances. He is under investigation at local and state levels in New York, by US federal authorities and by authorities in Brazil, in that case over the use of a stolen chequebook.On Monday, the Washington Post extended the story to Russia, reporting that Santos “has deeper ties than previously known” to Andrew Intrater, “a businessman who cultivated close links with a onetime Trump confidant and who is the cousin of a sanctioned Russian oligarch”.Intrater is related to Viktor Vekselberg, a billionaire in the Russian energy industry. Intrater’s links with Michael Cohen, then Trump’s lawyer and fixer, came under the gaze of Robert Mueller, the special counsel who investigated Russian election interference and links between Trump and Moscow.Santos has admitted to “embellishing” his résumé but denied wrongdoing and insisted he will not resign.Democrats have raised questions about how much McCarthy and other Republicans knew of Santos’s falsehoods before he won last November.On Sunday, Daniel Goldman told CBS that he and another New York Democrat, Ritchie Torres, had written to McCarthy, his lieutenant Elise Stefanik and the head of McCarthy’s Super Pac about “bombshell … reporting from the New York Times that they all knew about Mr Santos’s lies prior to the election”.On Monday, McCarthy told reporters: “I never knew about his résumé or not but I always had a few questions about it.”The Times report said that in 2021 a member of Santos’s staff pretended to be McCarthy’s chief of staff.On Tuesday, McCarthy said: “My staff had concerns when he had a staff member impersonate my chief of staff and that individual was let go when Mr Santos found out about it.”In a column for NBC News, meanwhile, Torres said that having grown up across the street from former president Donald Trump’s “gilded golf course, I know what it’s like to have the neighbourhood you love hijacked by a man who is deceitful to the core”.“Now”, Torres added, “as I begin my second term in Congress representing the good people of the Bronx, I find myself in an institution that I love hijacked by yet another liar, cheat and fraud.”TopicsGeorge SantosHouse of RepresentativesRepublicansUS politicsKevin McCarthynewsReuse this content More

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      George Santos a ‘bad guy’ who did ‘bad things’ but should not be forced out, top Republican says

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      George Santos a ‘bad guy’ who did ‘bad things’ but should not be forced out, top Republican saysNew York congressman’s résumé is largely fiction and campaign finance questions abide but support is vital for speaker McCarthy The New York Republican congressman George Santos, whose résumé has been shown to be largely fictional, whose campaign finances are the subject of increasing scrutiny and who is under local, federal and international investigation, is a “bad guy” who has done “really bad” things, the new House oversight committee chairman said on Sunday.McCarthy may be speaker, but Trump is the real leader of House RepublicansRead moreBut Santos should not be forced to quit, James Comer said.“He’s a bad guy,” the Kentuckian told CNN’ State of the Union. “This is something that you know, it’s really bad … but look, George Santos was a duly elected by the people. He’s going to be … examined thoroughly. It’s his decision whether or not he should resign.”Saying Santos was “not the first politician unfortunately to be in Congress to lie”, Comer said he had not introduced himself to Santos, “because it’s pretty despicable the lies that he told”. But he said only proven campaign finance violations should lead to Santos’s removal.Santos was going to be investigated, Comer said, “not necessarily for lies but for potential campaign finance violations … It’s his decision whether or not he should resign.”Santos won New York’s third district, which covers parts of Long Island and Queens, in November. Since then his biography has been shown to be largely made-up and his campaign finances scrutinised amid questions about his personal wealth.This week, Democrats in Congress requested an ethics committee campaign finance investigation and a nonpartisan watchdog, the Campaign Legal Center, filed its own request for an investigation by the Federal Election Commission.The CLC complaint said: “Particularly in light of Santos’s mountain of lies about his life and qualifications for office, the [FEC] should thoroughly investigate what appear to be equally brazen lies about how his campaign raised and spent money.”Santos’s district party has disowned him and New York Republicans in Congress have called on him to resign. Santos has said he will not.Kevin McCarthy, the House speaker who Santos supported through 15 rounds of voting earlier this month, and who must operate with a small majority, has not taken action, instead pointing to a House ethics office his party is attempting to gut.On Sunday Don Bacon of Nebraska, a Republican moderate, told ABC’s This Week: “You know, if that was me, I would resign. I wouldn’t be able to face my voters.”But Bacon still followed the party line: “This is between him and his constituents, largely. They’ve elected him and they have to deal with him on that. I don’t think his re-election chances would be that promising.”One of the Democrats who demanded an investigation said he had written to McCarthy and other senior Republicans.Dan Goldman, also of New York, told CBS’s Face the Nation: “The speaker of the House indicated that he would support an ethics investigation.“And in fact this morning, Congressman [Ritchie] Torres and I sent a letter to Speaker McCarthy, [Republican] chairwoman [Elise] Stefanik and the head of the Congressional Leadership Fund, Kevin McCarthy’s super Pac, because there’s really, really bombshell … reporting from the New York Times that they all knew about Mr Santos’s lies prior to the election.”Goldman said he and Torres were calling on Republicans “to be fully cooperative with the investigators, both in Congress and outside of Congress to disclose exactly what they knew about Mr Santos’s lies, and whether they were complicit in this scheme to defraud voters.“George Santos is a complete and total fraud … nearly everything has proven to be a lie. His financial disclosures have clear false statements and omissions. And that’s what we refer to the ethics committee for an investigation to get to the bottom of whether he broke the law.“Eight Republican Congress members have called on him to resign … This is a scheme to defraud the voters of the third district in New York, and this needs to be investigated intensively. And Mr Santos needs to think twice about whether he belongs in Congress. And more importantly, the speaker needs to think twice about whether Mr Santos is fit to serve in Congress.”On Saturday, a prominent GOP right-winger – and ringleader of the attempt to stop McCarthy becoming speaker – offered Santos support.Speaking to CNN, Matt Gaetz of Florida said: “George Santos represents over 700,000 people in New York. And whether people like that or not, those people deserve to have members of Congress collaborating with the person who serves them.“George Santos will have to go through the congressional ethics process. I don’t want to prejudge that process, but I think he deserves the chance to at least make his case.”Serial liar George Santos is the politician Americans deserve | Moira DoneganRead moreEarlier this week, Gaetz spoke to Santos on the former Trump adviser Steve Bannon’s podcast. Asked about his wealth, Santos nodded to Republican claims about Hunter Biden, Joe Biden’s son, saying: “I’ll tell you where it didn’t come from – it didn’t come from China, Ukraine or Burisma.”Santos is under investigation in Brazil, over the use of a stolen chequebook, and in the US over claims about his college history, business career and family background shown to be untrue. Santos has admitted “embellishing” his résumé but insisted he has done nothing wrong or unethical.On Bannon’s podcast, Gaetz said: “Embellishing one’s résumé isn’t a crime. It’s frankly, how a lot of people get to Congress. And we want everyone to be honest.”Writing for the Guardian, the columnist Moira Donegan pointed to Santos’s rise in a Republican party led by Donald Trump.“It would be a mistake to think that George Santos’s pathologies are his alone,” she wrote. “His lies are the product of a political system that incentivises dishonesty, punishes sincerity and is rife with opportunities for petty crooks.“In that sense, Santos is the politician that we deserve.”TopicsGeorge SantosRepublicansUS politicsUS CongressHouse of RepresentativesNew YorknewsReuse this content More

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      Serial liar George Santos is the politician Americans deserve | Moira Donegan

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      Serial liar George Santos is the politician Americans deserveMoira DoneganThe congressman’s many lies are the product of a political system that incentivizes dishonesty and punishes sincerity It’s hard to keep track of what, exactly, the newly elected Republican congressman George Santos has said about his own life. His story changes and contradicts itself; his lies seem indiscriminate, and largely ad hoc. He says he worked at Citigroup and Goldman Sachs, which he didn’t. He said he graduated from Baruch College – he didn’t do that, either. Some of his fabrications are so trivial and specific that it’s impossible to ascribe a nefarious motive to them.What could Santos possibly have to gain, for instance, by claiming, as he apparently did to a local Republican party leader, to have been a college volleyball champion? Others are transparently self-serving, his attempts to cover them up so brazen as to be frankly hilarious. On the campaign trail, running in the heavily Jewish third district of New York, on suburban Long Island, Santos claimed that he was “a member of the Jewish community”, and descended from Ukrainian refugees. When this turned out to be untrue, he later tried to claim that he merely meant that he was “Jew-ish”. It was like a line from Seinfeld; punning, implausible, shameless. At times like this, it’s hard to take Santos’s dishonesty seriously. It seems less like an affront to the dignity of the democratic process and more like some kind of durational satire, a piece of performance art.More Republicans call for George Santos to resign over fictional résuméRead moreBut if you take his fictional biography as a whole, it’s clear that Santos was appealing to particular American longings. He was quite savvily inventing a character who would assuage the anxieties and comfort the vanities of the affluent, Republican-leaning voters in his district. On the campaign trail, Santos presented himself as the embodiment of 20th century-style American upward mobility. He claimed to be the son of Brazilian immigrants, who grew up in “abject poverty” and attended public schools before ascending to become a blue-chip financial trader and wealthy philanthropist. It’s a dream that no doubt many still want to believe in. But it should have been a red flag. Anyone who assesses America with clear eyes knows that Goldman Sachs traders don’t come, as Santos says he did, from basement apartments in Jackson Heights, Queens. They come from Dalton, Choate and Exeter.He professed the identities that have been most easily demonized in the Republican imagination: he was supposed to be Jewish, a member of the group targeted by conspiratorial QAnon theories; he was supposed to be gay, a member of the group increasingly smeared on the right as pedophiles; he was supposed to be a Latino immigrant, a member of the group associated with dark fantasies in the white mind about demographic change and crime. But at the same time, he was a Republican, a defender of these bigotries; his membership in the very groups his party worked against seemed to absolve his voters of complicity even as they indulged their bias. The identities were not meant to be investments in the pluralism of our country, but moral shields, flimsy cover behind which attacks on those very groups could be launched.And of course, there were the remarkable historical coincidences, the tendency of Santos to claim his own life intersected with moments of crisis for the American conscience. He said that his grandparents – the supposedly Jewish ones – had been Holocaust survivors. He said that his mom had died in 9/11. He said that he had lost four employees at the Pulse massacre, the event where a gunman opened fire at an Orlando gay club. It seems that he used this proximity to tragedy to some effect in his fundraising; among the several investigations into Santos, there is now one related to campaign expenditures, and the curious way that money seemed to disappear from his account in amounts just beneath the federal reporting threshold where a receipt would be required. Santos, in this telling, had an uncanny, Forrest Gump-like biographical connection to these momentous historical moments, his own life changing at just the same moments that challenged the identity of the nation. It’s not hard to see why this fiction appealed to Santos, and why it appealed to his voters. It made him into an avatar of America itself.Expect the Republican House to be just like the speaker debacle: pure chaosRead moreMaybe he is. Because with his boldness and deception, his shamelessness and alleged comfort with financial malfeasance, Santos, with all his lies, seems to reveal an uncomfortable truth about American politics, emphasizing what the politics writer John Ganz called “the reign of crime”. Politicians, after all, lie all the time, and the Republican party in particular seems to have rapidly mainstreamed the use of fabulism, fraud and cheap scams that manipulate and extort the government, the public and the ruling elite. Are Santos’s lies, after all, any more far-fetched than Trump’s claims that the 2020 election was stolen from him via a vast, undetected conspiracy? Are his lies about where he worked and went to school any more nefarious than the claim that Covid vaccines kill people, or that drag queens are scheming to molest children at public libraries? Perhaps Santos’s real sin is not in lying, but in telling the wrong lies. He didn’t regurgitate the same fabrications as the rest of his fellow Republicans – the ones about marginalized others. Instead, he merely lied about himself. And crucially, he lied about the one thing that seems to really matter to Republican leadership: he claimed to be a member of the monied elite, when he wasn’t.Santos’s fellow New York Republicans are trying to distance themselves from the congressman, calling on him to resign in the hopes that it will help their own re-election chances. “He needs help,” said Jennifer DeSena, a local Republican official from Long Island. “This is not a normal person.” And indeed it’s hard not to suspect that there might be something wrong with the man, aside from the moral turpitude – a delusional tendency or break with reality that precipitated all these fictions. But it would be a mistake to think that George Santos’s pathologies are his alone. His lies are the product of a political system that incentivizes dishonesty, punishes sincerity and is rife with opportunities for petty crooks. In that sense, Santos is the politician that we deserve.
      Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist
      TopicsGeorge SantosOpinionRepublicansUS politicscommentReuse this content More

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      Can George Santos outrun his lies? Politics Weekly America

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      Last week, the much-talked-about George Santos, of Long Island, New York, was sworn into office. The Democrats and even some Republicans think he should have resigned after he admitted to lying about a lot of things during his campaign.
      So who is the real George Santos? How likely is it that he’ll see out his full term in office? And does his success tell us more about the state of US politics than it does an individual’s misgivings? Jonathan Freedland and Will Bredderman of the Daily Beast discuss the man behind the lies

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      More Republicans call for George Santos to resign over fictional résumé

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      More Republicans call for George Santos to resign over fictional résuméNewly elected New York congressman insists he will not step down despite lies about background and education being exposed Republican members of Congress have joined state party officials in calling for the New York representative George Santos to resign, heaping more pressure on the disgraced politician who won election in November with a largely fictional biography.In Santos’s district, reactions to brazen lies remain mixed: ‘I might let him slide’Read moreAnthony D’Esposito, who represents New York’s fourth congressional district, neighbouring Santos in the third, said on Wednesday Santos had lost the faith of voters and did “not have the ability” to represent them, the New York Times reported.Santos, whose lies about his family background, education and work history were exposed by the Times, has insisted he will not resign, despite a slew of investigations and a complaint to the Federal Election Committee over his campaign finances.D’Esposito told reporters he would actively encourage “other representatives in the House of Representatives to join me in rejecting” Santos.He was joined in short order by three other first-term Republican congressmen from New York, the Times said. Two more weighed in on Thursday.The three were Nick LaLota, who like Santos and D’Esposito represents parts of Long Island; Nick Langworthy, the New York party chair who represents part of the upstate southern tier; and Brandon Williams, from a district near Syracuse.LaLota was particularly scathing, according to Axios.“I definitely share their sentiments,” he said of state party officials’ calls for Santos to give up his seat. “What he’s done is disgraceful, dishonorable and unworthy of the office. I think he should resign.”Williams tweeted a statement.“As more revelations become public, I concur with the Nassau Republicans’ decision to request George Santos’ resignation,” he wrote.“The constituents in NY-3 elected Representative Santos in part due to his biographical exaggerations and apparent deceptions. He must resign.”On Thursday morning, CNN’s chief congressional reporter, Manu Raju, tweeted that he had spoken with two more Republican New Yorkers, Marcus Molinaro and Mike Lawler, who concurred with their fellow congressmen.“There’s no way I believe [Santos] can fully fulfill his responsibilities,” Molinaro was quoted as saying.Santos has admitted “embellishing” his résumé, including lying about his college record – he did not attend Baruch and New York University – and saying a “poor choice of words” created the impression he worked for Citigroup and Goldman Sachs.He has claimed a tragic link to the Pulse nightclub shooting and said the attacks on New York on 11 September 2001 “claimed my mother’s life”. His mother died in 2016.He has claimed to have Jewish roots and to be descended from Holocaust survivors. He has claimed to be part Black, but while voting for Kevin McCarthy to be House speaker last week, he appeared to flash a “white power” sign.He is under investigation in New York and in Brazil, in the latter case over the use of a stolen checkbook.On Thursday, Hakeem Jeffries, the Democratic minority leader in the House and another New Yorker, had stern words for Republican leaders.Santos, Jeffries said, was “a complete and total fraud. He lied to the voters of the third congressional district in New York. He deceived and connived his way into Congress, and is now the responsibility of House Republicans to do something about it.“This is not a partisan issue, but it is an issue that Republicans need to handle. Clean up your house. You can start with George Santos.”Earlier this week, two New York Democrats, Daniel Goldman and Ritchie Torres, hand-delivered to Santos their request for an investigation of his campaign finances.Jeffries said: “I was well aware of their decision to do so. But any matters before the ethics committee … should be resolved by members of the ethics committee.”Kevin McCarthy, the Republican House speaker, was also asked about Santos on Thursday. He told reporters: “What I find is that voters have elected George Santos. If there is a concern he will go through ethics. If there is something that is found it will be dealt with in that manner. But they [voters] have a voice in this process.”Santos remains defiant – even after being disowned by his own district Republican party.On Wednesday, Joseph Cairo, chair of the Nassau county Republican committee, criticized Santos for running a campaign of “deceit, lies and fabrication”.“He’s disgraced the House of Representatives, and we do not consider him one of our congresspeople,” Cairo told reporters. “Today, on behalf of the Nassau county Republican committee, I am calling for his immediate resignation.”Cairo even said Santos did not just claim to have attended colleges he did not attend, but claimed to have been “a star on the Baruch volleyball team and that they won the league championship”.In response, Santos tweeted: “I was elected to serve the people of the New York third district not the party and politicians, I remain committed to doing that and regret to hear that local officials refuse to work with my office to deliver results to keep our community safe and lower the cost of living.“I will NOT resign!”TopicsRepublicansGeorge SantosUS politicsNew YorknewsReuse this content More

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      George Santos says he won’t resign as fellow Republicans call on him to quit

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      George Santos says he won’t resign as fellow Republicans call on him to quitChair of Nassau county committee says Santos ran ‘a campaign of deceit, lies and fabrication’ to win third district The Republican George Santos said on Wednesday he would not resign from Congress less than a week after being sworn in, despite calls to do so from the chairman of his district committee and a fellow New York representative, amid continuing scrutiny of Santos’s mostly made-up résumé and growing calls for campaign finance investigations.In Santos’s district, reactions to brazen lies remain mixed: ‘I might let him slide’Read moreIn a tweet, Santos said: “I was elected to serve the people of the New York third district not the party and politicians, I remain committed to doing that and regret to hear that local officials refuse to work with my office to deliver results to keep our community safe and lower the cost of living.“I will NOT resign!”He was responding to remarks to reporters by Joseph Cairo, chair of the Nassau county Republican committee, who said Santos ran “a campaign of deceit, lies and fabrication” to win the third district last year.At the same time, a first sitting Republican congressman, Anthony D’Esposito, also of New York, called on Santos to quit.Santos has faced a barrage of negative coverage.He has admitted to “embellishing” his résumé, including lying about his college record – he did not attend Baruch and New York University – and saying a “poor choice of words” created the impression he worked for Citigroup and Goldman Sachs.He has claimed a tragic link to the Pulse nightclub shooting and said the attacks on New York on 11 September 2001 “claimed my mother’s life”. His mother died in 2016.He has claimed to have Jewish roots and to be descended from Holocaust survivors.He is under investigation in New York and in Brazil, in the latter case over the use of a stolen chequebook.His Democratic predecessor in the third district has called him a “conman”.Cairo said Santos “deceived the voters of the third congressional district, he deceived the members of the Nassau county Republican committee, elected officials, his colleagues, candidates, his opponents and even some of the media.“His lies were not mere fibs. He disgraced the House of Representatives. In particular, his fabrications went too far. Many groups were hurt. Specifically, those families that were touched by the horrors of the Holocaust. I feel for them.“He has no place in the Nassau county Republican committee, nor should he serve in public service nor as an elected official. He is not welcome here at Republican headquarters for meetings or at any of our events. As I said, he’s disgraced the House of Representatives, and we do not consider him one of our congresspeople.“Today, on behalf of the Nassau county Republican committee. I am calling for his immediate resignation.”In his own statement, to Politico, D’Esposito said Santos’s “many hurtful lies and mistruths … have irreparably broken the trust of the residents he is sworn to serve. For his betrayal of the public’s trust, I call on [him] to resign”.Santos was sworn into Congress last weekend, almost a week late after backing Kevin McCarthy, the House Republican leader, through 15 votes for speaker.Casting one vote, Santos appeared to flash a “white power” sign. He has previously claimed to be partly Black. He also told the New York Post he was “Catholic. Because I learned my maternal family had a Jewish background I said I was ‘Jew-ish’.”Another newly elected New York Republican, Nick LaLota, has called for an investigation. On Tuesday, two New York Democrats who hand-delivered a request for an ethics investigation of Santos, Daniel Goldman and Ritchie Torres, said they had heard from Republicans who supported such a step.But Republican leaders have not acted.On Tuesday, Politico reported that Republicans were discussing what to do. Santos told the site he expected to be given committee assignments. On Wednesday, asked if Santos would sit on top committees, McCarthy said: “No.”Seizing on Cairo’s remarks, Jaime Harrison, chair of the Democratic National Committee, tweeted that McCarthy’s “spine found a new home in Nassau county”.Harrison added: “It is shameful that a New York county party chair has to protect and defend the honor of the House of Representatives against the lies of Santos while McCarthy is too scared to even utter his name.”In Washington on Tuesday, Goldman and Torres delivered to Santos their demand for an investigation by the House ethics committee.Goldman, like Santos elected last November, said: “Santos, we have a complaint for you.”Santos said: “Sure.”In their complaint, Goldman and Torres cited “extensive public reporting – as well as Santos’s own admissions … that Mr Santos misled voters in his district about his ethnicity, his religion, his education, and his employment and professional history, among other things”.They requested an investigation of Santos for “failing to file timely, accurate and complete financial disclosure reports as required by law”.Santos’s campaign finances are the subject of a complaint filed with the Federal Election Commission by the Campaign Legal Center (CLC), a non-partisan watchdog.George Santos scandal: Democratic predecessor calls him a ‘conman’Read moreThe CLC complaint questions the source of Santos’s personal wealth and the propriety of loans to his own campaign.Torres and Goldman called Santos’s financial reports for a failed run in 2020 and his win in 2022 “sparse and perplexing”, adding: “At a minimum it is apparent he did not file timely disclosure reports for his most recent campaign.”They wrote: “If Mr Santos’s 2020 and 2022 financial disclosures are to be believed, his salary increased from $55,000 in 2020 to $750,000 in 2021 and 2022, of which he gave a whopping $705,000 to his campaign.“The committee should investigate the veracity of these claims and whether Mr Santos has engaged in fraudulent activity.”Santos told reporters that though Goldman and Torres were “free to do whatever they want to do”, he was not concerned, as he had “done nothing unethical”.Asked if he had done anything wrong, he said: “I have not.”Torres and Goldman also said Santos had “failed to uphold the integrity expected of members of the House of Representatives”.TopicsGeorge SantosRepublicansDemocratsNew YorkUS CongressHouse of RepresentativesUS political financingnewsReuse this content More

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      The Sad Tales of George Santos

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      What would it be like to be so ashamed of your life that you felt compelled to invent a new one?Most of us don’t feel compelled to do that. Most of us take the actual events of our lives, including the failures and frailties, and we gradually construct coherent narratives about who we are. Those autobiographical narratives are always being updated as time passes — and, of course, tend to be at least modestly self-flattering. But for most of us, the life narrative we tell both the world and ourselves gives us a stable sense of identity. It helps us name what we’ve learned from experience and what meaning our life holds. It helps us make our biggest decisions. As the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre once observed, you can’t know what to do unless you know what story you are a part of.A reasonably accurate and coherent autobiographical narrative is one of the most important things a person can have. If you don’t have a real story, you don’t have a real self.George Santos, on the other hand, is a young man who apparently felt compelled to jettison much of his actual life and replace it with fantasy. As Grace Ashford and Michael Gold of The Times have been reporting, in his successful run for Congress this year he claimed he had a college degree that he does not have. He claimed he held jobs that he did not hold. He claimed he owned properties he apparently does not own. He claims he never committed check fraud, though The Times unearthed court records suggesting he did. He claims he never described himself as Jewish, merely as adjacently “Jew-ish.” A self-described gay man, he hid a yearslong heterosexual marriage that ended in 2019.All politicians — perhaps all human beings — embellish. But what Santos did goes beyond that. He fabricated a new persona, that of a meritocratic superman. He claims to be a populist who hates the elites, but he wanted you to think he once worked at Goldman Sachs. Imagine how much inadequacy you’d have to feel to go to all that trouble.I can’t feel much anger toward Santos for his deceptiveness, just a bit of sorrow. Cutting yourself off to that degree from the bedrock of the truth renders your whole life unstable. Santos made his own past unreliable, perpetually up for grabs. But when you do that you also eliminate any coherent vision of your future. People may wonder how Santos could have been so dumb. In political life, his fabrications were bound to be discovered. Perhaps it’s because dissemblers often have trouble anticipating the future; they’re stuck in the right now.In a sense Santos is a sad, farcical version of where Donald Trump has taken the Republican Party — into the land of unreality, the continent of lies. Trump’s takeover of the G.O.P. was not primarily an ideological takeover, it was a psychological and moral one. I don’t feel sorry for Trump the way I do for Santos, because Trump is so cruel. But he did introduce, on a much larger scale, the same pathetic note into our national psychology.In his book, “The Strange Case of Donald J. Trump,” the eminent personality psychologist Dan McAdams argues that Trump could continually lie to himself because he had no actual sense of himself. There was no real person, inner life or autobiographical narrative to betray. McAdams quotes people who had been close to Trump who reported that being with him wasn’t like being with a conventional person; it was like being with an entity who was playing the role of Donald Trump. And that role had no sense of continuity. He was fully immersed in whatever dominance battle he was fighting at that moment.McAdams calls Trump an “episodic man,” who experiences life as a series of disjointed moments, not as a coherent narrative flow of consciousness. “He does not look to what may lie ahead, at least not very far ahead,” McAdams writes. “Trump is not introspective, retrospective or prospective. There is no depth; there is no past; there is no future.”America has always had impostors and people who reinvented their pasts. (If he were real, Jay Gatsby might have lived — estimations of the precise locations of the fictional East and West Egg vary — in what is now Santos’s district.) This feels different. I wonder if the era of the short-attention spans and the online avatars is creating a new character type: the person who doesn’t experience life as an accumulation over decades, but just as a series of disjointed performances in the here and now, with an echo of hollowness inside.This week Santos tried to do a bit of damage control in a series of interviews, including with WABC radio in New York. The whole conversation had an air of unreality. Santos was rambling, evasive and haphazard, readjusting his stories in a vague, fluid way. The host, John Catsimatidis, wasn’t questioning him the way a journalist might. He was practically coaching Santos on what to say. The troubling question of personal integrity was not on anybody’s radar screen. And then the conversation reached a Tom Wolfe-ian crescendo when former Congressman Anthony Weiner suddenly appeared — and turned out to be the only semi-competent interviewer in the room.Karl Marx famously said that under the influence of capitalism, all that’s solid melts into air. I wonder if some elixir of Trumpian influence and online modernity can have the same effect on individual personalities.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More